Best cars to own: Driver Power 2019 results

Thousands of you had your say in the UK’s largest car satisfaction survey. So here are the best buys
Welcome to Driver Power 2019 and, first of all, thank you. Seemingly every business and service asks for feedback these days, so we’ve been truly overwhelmed by the thousands of you who took the time to complete this year’s new car ownership survey.

Driver Power is the UK’s largest, most comprehensive car satisfaction poll, asking myriad questions on life with the models you’ve bought over the past 24 months. We get down to minute detail like infotainment screen sensitivity and levels of legroom. As well as compiling quantitative scores for those areas and 29 others, we add your subjective comments on life with your cars.

The big question will be which model is this year’s Driver Power winner; can Peugeot’s 3008 retain its 2018 crown? Beyond that, we list your category kings – the cars rated cheapest to run or the best handling. You’ll also find our 16 class winners; vital if you know you want, say, a city car or a premium mid-size SUV.

Whether or not you took part in Driver Power this year, we hope you’ll find the results useful. And if you didn’t complete the 2019 survey, there’s always next year.

Below are the full results of the 2019 Driver Power new car survey. This includes details of how the rating system works, an interactive table and full details on the top 75 best cars to own. Click on to page two for the best cars to own in each market segment, from city cars to SUVs…

It’s all horses for courses I thought the mk4 Prius was an average at best ride, very plastic cheap interior and the seats not very supportive. So how it finishes top? I guess there are just loads and loads of them on the road?

Funny, my current & 1st new vag car had returned appalling mpg, broke down with parts failure(which the dealer refused to accapt), has now had a fault for 5 months that they either can’t or won’t fix as they’ve had 6 attempts & come up with a different excuse for not rectifying every time, the electric window switches only work when they want to, the infotainment display freezes randomly and can only be reset by switching the car off and back on again then doing a reset, the dipping passenger mirror only works for about a week and then needs setting up again, these are just some of the problems, oh, it also rattles everywhere on the interior, eats front tyres, etc etc.

Phil forgive me but above, you have done what all German car drivers do: dismiss stories of faults and failures German makes as exceptions to the rule. Its the same type of person who would say ‘typical’ when talking about French cars unreliability.

I’ve owned 45 cars of every type, French, Italian, German etc, and all were equally reliable, in general. However the non German ones had more character and are the ones I recall with some affection.

The last 5 French cars I’ve owned have been 100% reliable, I do remember the days of tatty old knockers that fell to bits just looking at them but the french/italian etc cars of today are an entirely different prospect, well made, stylish design, lots or tech, great to drive and good economy, to tar these with the brush from yesteryear seems unfair in the extreme really, to me anyway.